Follow us on 𝕏 | Give us a Shoutout | Sponsor Specs

⌐◪-◪ → Vitalik woke up feeling inspired today and decided to sing on stage at Token2049 in Singapore. I can’t believe all of my wealth is in this man’s hands.

Vitalik, if this is how you bull post — it’s not working (at least not yet).

On a more serious note, during his speech, Vitalik highlighted two big milestones for Ethereum layer 2s — the reduction in transaction costs and confirmation times.

More specifically, he celebrated how transaction costs on Ethereum L2s have gone to “basically zero” — a significant milestone considering we used to pay upwards of $200+ for high-priority transactions. He also mentioned how the average waiting time until the next block is half what it used to be, bringing transaction times down to 5-15 seconds.

Looking forward, Vitalik emphasized our need to satisfy mainstream adoption while maintaining our values of open-source software and decentralization.

Man, it’s always a good day when we hear from Lord Vitalik.

🎵 it’s mathematical, no more double-spend, it’s encryptable, put your cash in your brain or it’s wearable — A NEW FORM OF WEALTH BEGINS…

⌐◪-◪ → Next week, Wintermute is launching OutcomeMarket, a decentralized prediction market that will initially focus on the election. The market has a few key features worth highlighting:

1. Interoperability: The market will let users participate directly in prediction markets across Ethereum and its most popular layer-2 networks (Base and Arbitrum) eliminating the need to bridge between networks — a notable performance benefit.

2. Permissionless Listing: The platform will leverage permissionless smart contracts to enable any trading platform (centralized or decentralized) to list its tokens without imposing any minting or transaction fees, no walled garden — another notable performance benefit.

Their hope is to create a more accessible and efficient market by reducing the barriers to entry. Of course, they aren’t alone — they’re up against both Polymarket and Kalshi (the incumbents) and other new players like Myriad Markets (in Beta) and Limitless Labs who just raised a 3M pre-seed round.

Meanwhile, the CFTC continues to FUD prediction markets, warning people of election betting risks, threatening that they’re “keeping an eye” on offshore markets, and that they’re still committed to pursuing the Kalshi case.

It’s starting to feel like we’re in the middle of a prediction market gold rush. The real question is, who will win?

⌐◪-◪ → Google Cloud just dropped an Ethereum-compatible RPC service and the devs are going wild! (Okay, maybe they not going wild, but they would be).

For the uninitiated, RPC stands for remote procedure call and it essentially lets dApps communicate with the blockchain without running a full node.

Google’s service will initially support Ethereum mainnet and testnets, with plans to expand to other blockchains next year. The free version will support 100 requests/second and 1M requests/day, with premium options for enterprise users.

This move signals Google’s commitment to Web3, this is more than just a product launch — it puts them in direct competition with Infura, Alchemy, and QuickNode, our critical web3 infrastructure providers. While it’s hard to say who will win, I reckon the key is a mix of reliability, onboarding, usability, and costs.

It’s important to note that crypto folk don’t love Google, so let’s see if they can win over the cypherpunk developers. Either way, love or hate Google, this is exactly the sort of competition we need for our space — big win.

Join Specs Chat!

Designed to make you a better crypto investor, builder, and operator.

💬 Chat with Valko and other experts
📚 Access additional hand-curated resources
😊 Make friends, share memes, have fun